Car & Driver

An old industrial building with a filling station in front has been turned into an exclusive car showroom on Friedrich-Ebert-Damm, a thoroughfare on the outskirts of Hamburg. The structure and geometry of the main building have been retained as the basis of the new architectural concept for a sales showroom, workshops, a hall to ‘shelter’ classic oldtimers, as well as office and storage areas. Once the structure had been gutted and the filling station demolished, the building received a new roof cladding; an additional half of a ceiling element was set in front of the flatly inclined pitched roofs and completed by adding a glass façade facing the street. This planar fitting system for glass was the first of its kind to be enacted in Germany. The prodigious glazed areas generously enable a view of the automobiles in the showroom behind. The façade was slanted ten degrees away from the vertical axis to prevent bothersome reflections stemming from the surroundings. To the front, a water basin in the outer zone casts light into the showroom via reflection; a bridge leads over it to the entrance. Offices and special areas have been positioned in the rear part of the building as stand-alone structures plastered in white in accordance with the ‘building-within-a-building’ principle.